Category Archives: Special events

The ensemble has been actively updating repertoire in our “book” of tunes available for various performances and also creating new music for a collaboration with the duo Nagual for the Black Lab Performance Series held at Paragraph Gallery.

We began this process in the summer by re-introducing a composition by our teacher, I Ketút Gedé Asnawa, that was composed for the group early in his residency entitled Gita GentaKasturi.

This work was incorporated in an hour-long performance curated by ensemble member Shawn Hansen in collaboration with visiting artists Nagual, primarily a guitar duo, that occurred on Oct 5 at the Paragraph Gallery. This performance also incorporated “conduction” like textures created and directed by ensemble members Sam Hughes and Wayne Yockey. The inclusion of these improvised textures heralded a new direction in available sonic approaches for the group, since most tradtional gamelan repertoire is highly composed.

Our work since completing this performance has involved primarily re-introducing a standard dance work from Balinese repertoire entitled Oleg Tamulilingancomposed by I Wayan Beratha.

We plan to present part of this piece along with a demo for the December 13th Open House event at 5pm in the Black Box on the 6th Floor of Town Pavilion.

Our next concert event will be a small group performance as part of Jazz Winterlude at Johnson County Community College on January 25 at 4pm.

On Saturday August 17, 2013, Gamelan Genta Kasturi was both proud and pleased to support Kansas City’s Indonesian community by providing live music for their dance troupe at the 2013 Ethnic Enrichment Festival at the Swope Park Pavilion. The Indonesian 30-minute presentation began at 7:30 pm and was very well received by the audience, which was said to be the largest number of attendees in the history of the festival. We are very happy to have reconnected with our friends in the Indonesian Community and look forward to future collaborations!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the event, The Kansas City Ethnic Enrichment Commission states: “For 34 years, the residents of the [KC] metropolitan area and visitors to the midwest celebrate our annual “Taste the World” Festival. This three-day event is one of the largest festivals of its kind in the country and features more than 66 different cultures selling their native foods, crafts and performing ethnic music and dances. Each year, the festival is held during the third full weekend of August near the front entrance of historic Swope Park, Meyer Boulevard and Swope Parkway.”

Gamelan Genta Kasturi, Kansas City’s community Balinese gamelan orchestra, celebrates it’s 10th Anniversary with a special concert in the Truman Forum of the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library (4801 Main Street Kansas City, MO 64112) at 4pm on Saturday May 18.

This performance will be an overview of material from the group’s ten year history and will include traditional Balinese repertoire and original compositions by ensemble founder I Ketút Gedé Asnawa and current ensemble director Patrick Alonzo Conway.

Gamelan Genta Kasturi had a good turn out for our Open Studios Performance on Sat Mar 9 in the Black Box Theater at Town Pavilion. About fifty people came out and received an overvue of Balinese gamelan music including a new creation Beleganjur composed by ensemble director Patrick Alonzo Conway, Catur Rawita composed for the group by ensemble founder I Ketút Gedé Asnawa, Blossoming Dance also by Conway, Kebyar Ding (1928) by I Wayan Regog, and Angels & Demons at Play a re-composition by Conway of a Sun Ra piece.

“I think you need to be vigilant. I’m a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can’t help but see the world in a certain kind of way. For my own sanity, I find it necessary to seek out beauty in the world, and I do that through music, and through literature and nature, and in the same ways that everybody else does, I suppose. That seems to be important to me.” Nick Cave